Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Musings from the Man Booker-winning author after his first
meeting with one of the biggest — and nicest — stars on the planet.

By MARLON JAMES

SEPT. 7, 2016

1. Brad Pitt is a plant murderer.

The
worst kind, too. The kind who lets a plant starve to death. The
evidence, at two opposing corners of his office in Beverly Hills;
skeletal remnants that long gave up hope of ever being watered. He’s
been away for 10 months, he says. An explanation, if not exactly an
excuse. Regardless, I vow to expose his plant-murdering ways because the
American public deserves to know, and besides, at 52 one should take
whatever notoriety one can get.

I’m
at Plan B, the film production company Pitt co-founded in 2001 and now
owns, and I’ve decided to impress him with my knowledge of architecture,
something he learned about while helping to rebuild the Lower Ninth
Ward in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. I figured I’d introduce him
to Shigeru Ban, famous for his Cardboard Cathedral in Christchurch, New
Zealand, and other disaster-relief projects around the world. But there,
sitting on Pitt’s bookshelf, is an entire monograph of his work.

Near
his record player are Joe Strummer’s albums with the Mescaleros, not a
surprise, but also rare books on fringe culture, including Danny Lyon’s
“The Bikeriders,” which are. This is a revelation not because Pitt is a
megastar, which can lead to a certain out-of-touchness, but because he’s
a father, and the first thing that goes after having kids is coolness.
The first thing that comes are jorts. So when he gets up to shake my
hand — dressed in a white T-shirt, white jeans and a white fedora — he
seems more like the Dude than a dad.

2. Brad Pitt knows money can’t buy happiness.

“War
Machine,” one of his two new films out this fall, is based on “The
Operators,” Michael Hasting’s blistering account of U.S. military
command, their occasionally reckless maneuvers and the political
blowback that happened when a certain decorated general — played by Pitt
— let his guard way, way down. (The other movie is Robert Zemeckis’s
romantic assassination thriller “Allied,” also based on actual events.)
“It’s a satire on the decision makers who end up sending our young men
and women to war,” he says. “It’s about the absurdity of the process,
the machinery itself, the self-interest involved — and it’s insanely
funny, until it’s not.”

Discussing
the thin line between tragedy and comedy leads us to talking about
sadness and happiness in general, which then leads Pitt to an
observation: During his frequent travels around the world he has
encountered many people who seem to have no cause for happiness — and
yet it’s those very people, those in the most dire circumstances, who
somehow manage to appear the most content. It is why, he says, people
like him — people with money and time — feel so compelled to change
those circumstances. Which isn’t always a good thing, and he knows it.
“I’ve gone into areas of third-world countries where people have
suffered the most, but those people always seem to have the biggest
laugh,” he says. As a Jamaican native who has witnessed quite a few
third-world missions, I tell him that sometimes our biggest laugh is
directed at foreign do-gooders who really have no idea how to fix our
problems. “I’ve been one of those at times,” he admits. “But you’ve got
to start somewhere. You start with your best intentions, understanding
the world as you do. And then you get in and you see that it’s much more
complicated than you could possibly imagine. Our failings in foreign
policy have always been to think that we can place our ideas on another
culture, while not really understanding the other culture.”

3. Brad Pitt is very aware of your opinion of celebrity opinions.

But
one of the reasons I agreed to this interview was to do more than
remind the world that, aw shucks, he’s just a regular guy. Such a thing
would be ridiculous, anyway: A Google search of his name yields roughly
45 million results; nearly 10 million pop up for “Brad Pit” alone. This
is, after all, the guy who as a seductive thief in “Thelma & Louise”
proved there’s no such thing as a small part. Someone once famously
said that he is a character actor trapped in a leading man’s body, which
is true, but he’s also the last real movie star to come out of
Hollywood. I don’t ask him if he likes to puzzle over his kids’
homework.

Instead
I ask him about Brexit. “Man, I never thought that would happen. Same
way I can’t bring myself to think that Trump will be in charge. In the
simplest terms, what brings us together is good, and what separates us
is bad. We have this great line in ‘The Big Short,’ ” he says, referring
to the Oscar-winning film about the global financial crisis of 2008,
which he produced. “When things are going wrong and we can’t find the
reason for it, we just start creating enemies.” I mention that when
creating those enemies, we often look no further than what’s right in
front of us. Gays, for example. “Or illegal immigrants,” he says. He
keeps wondering aloud about this, not because he’s all that interested
in extremism, bigotry, religiosity and fear as part of an actual
pathology — or Trump supporters and the religious right, for that matter
— but because in another version of this story, where the movie star
thing hadn’t clicked and he remained stuck in his home state, that could
have been his fate. “Coming from Oklahoma, southern Missouri, which
leans more toward a Trump voice, I try to understand it.”

“It
seems that the people who suffer the most end up betting for the party
that would hurt them,” he goes on. “And so I try to understand where
they’re coming from.” When I suggest that money has a lot to do with it —
Belgium supporting Tutsi control over the Hutus, and building
resentment, prompted genocide — he agrees. But a recent conversation he
had with a scholar from the Brookings Institution, the Washington, D.C.
think tank, sparked a different view, one where the cause of strife
can’t be explained by simple economics. “You gotta understand,” he says,
“that it’s also in our DNA. Most Americans don’t have time to watch CNN
and Fox and Al Jazeera. They’re trying to make the rent, get the kids
fed, they’re tired when they get home and they want to forget about
everything. And so suddenly when this voice comes in — and it doesn’t
have to be a voice of substance — saying he’s fed up with all of this,
that’s the part that hooks into the DNA.”

A
fair point to consider, that our social behaviors, prejudices and even
the mental process of who we choose to love or hate is rooted in
biology, but how does this convince people to actually buy what Trump is
selling? “What I’m most hopeful about is that we’re a global
neighborhood now, and we start to understand each other more and more —
and yet, you see this reactionary push for isolation and separation
again.” Pitt shrugs, and says that he thinks a lot of people feel alone,
and on a certain level, again because of his background, he knows what
that’s like. “A Trump supporter is fighting against just about
everything,” he says. “What does he even mean, take our country back?
Would someone please explain that to me?” Pitt looks at me, impish and
totally serious at the same time. “Where’d it go?”

4. Brad Pitt and I agree about Mel Gibson.

Like
his friend and “Inglourious Basterds” director Quentin Tarantino,
Pitt’s scholarship in the craft of the medium has mostly been the medium
itself. More than that, film was for him a window into the world.
“Movies were a way out,” he says. “If you live in a vacuum and suddenly
you’re exposed to the world, you’re exposed to other cultures. And
remember, this was pre-internet. This was the only lens that could show
me how a kid in Brooklyn lived, a kid in Ireland, a kid in Africa.”

On
the topic of exotic worlds, he mentions a film he’d like to make about
Pontius Pilate, mostly because the script, which focuses on a mediocre
Roman official stuck in the middle of nowhere with difficult people he
doesn’t like, makes him smile. Jesus doesn’t get much screen time. “It
certainly won’t be for the ‘Passion’ crowd,” he says, which reminds me
that Mel Gibson’s torture-porn epic is one of the things that drove me
out of the church. Pitt bursts into laughter. “I felt like I was just
watching an L. Ron Hubbard propaganda film.”

5. Brad Pitt’s “I’m getting old” joke is better than yours.

It’s
easy to forget that the man is 52 — if anything he’s too skinny — but
his children’s interest in relics from the past regularly drives home
the point. One of his daughters, for example, loves cassette tapes the
way someone Pitt’s age might have a fondness for the gramophone, or
making his own daguerreotype. He’s also reminded of his age on set.
“When I was making a World War II movie called ‘Fury,’ we did this boot
camp for a week, and Logan Lerman, who was the youngest actor of the
bunch — I think he was 21 — was given grunt detail. We gave him a watch
and he had to keep track of how long it took us to eat and get in and
out of our gear. One day he came to me and said the watch has stopped,
and I said, ‘You’ve just got to wind it.’ He came back literally 15
minutes later and said, ‘Wait, how do you wind it?’ ”

6. Maybe Brad Pitt is a regular guy.

The
good thing about playing an interview slow and loose, especially when
you’ve caught your subject on a free day, is that you can slide into the
type of half-substantial, half-trivial conversation only possible with
truly friendly people. Not to say that Pitt isn’t sometimes on his guard
when it comes to discussing touchy subjects like income inequality and
whitewashing in Hollywood. But there’s a casual intimacy to the few
hours we’ve spent together, shooting the breeze with a rapport so easy
that I keep turning the recorder back on after I assume the interview is
over; him talking about falling under the spell of New Orleans, or
being a “sucker for an underdog story,” or how “Beasts of the Southern
Wild” is an amazing film that broke his heart.

The
bad thing about playing an interview slow and loose is that you’re
never sure how to end it. So I keep hanging out at his office, touring
the compound and overhearing him on the phone dealing with daddy
business, when I realize I’m about to miss my flight. He orders me a car
and walks me outside to the gate. It’s not until this moment, under the
glare of the California sun, that I’m confronted with the absurdity of
standing next to Brad Pitt, on the side of the road, waiting for an
Uber.

...

Marlon James won the 2015
Man Booker Prize for Fiction for his devastating third novel, “A Brief
History of Seven Killings.” During his three-hour conversation with Brad
Pitt at the actor’s office in Beverly Hills, for T’s Sept. 11 Men’s
Style issue, James avoided inquiring about Angelina Jolie Pitt or their
children. Instead, he says, “I wanted to know how he felt about Donald
Trump, whether his architecture jones was for real and, more than
anything, I wanted to know how a kid from the Bible Belt became such a
liberal, pro-gay, not-so-pro-God activist.”

Hair by Natalia
Bruschi for Beauty & Grooming using cream pomade from Mess of Blues.
Grooming by Jean Black. Set design by Piers Hanmer. Retouching by
Dtouch NY. Production by Lindsay Heimer for North Six Productions.
Tailoring by Raul Zevallos. Digital Technician: Nicholas Ong.
Photographer’s assistants: Nick Brinley, Maru Teppei and James Perry.
Stylist’s assistants: Kelly Harris and Megan King.

A version of this article appears in print on September 11, 2016, on page M2128 of T Magazine with the headline: Five or Six Things I Didn’t Know About Brad Pitt. Today's Paper|Subscribe